APT rolled out Marketing Cloud in late 2018 and began to successfully improve customer engagement. Then, when COVID-19 hit, the business shifted its thinking and realised the need to reimagine the customer experience. It saw Marketing Cloud as a way to best engage with customers and provide valuable and timely information. In the early days of the pandemic, APT used Marketing Cloud to keep customers and retail travel agents informed of changing restrictions and the suspension of tours. Then, it became all about nurturing customers and continuing to inspire their love of travel.
“We had to very quickly adjust our thinking and our marketing approach. In the early days of the crisis, it became less about selling and more about inspiring customers to start dreaming again,” said Russack. “Once we saw sentiment starting to recover, we were able to shift our focus back to providing realistic travel opportunities for our valued guests.”
Like many businesses during the pandemic, APT also had to reduce its marketing spend and that meant relying less on paid media and more on its owned channels. With Marketing Cloud, APT was able to be much more targeted in its approach to email and optimise engagement. For example, the marketing team carried out propensity modelling and then used Marketing Cloud to promote local destinations to those most likely to travel domestically.
The team also built out customer lifetime value segments for APT’s brands and used these to send more personalised campaigns and journeys. As a result, email open rates increased to 40%, double the previous benchmark of 20%. Click-through rates (CTRs) also doubled, and the company increased the percentage of traffic flowing from email to its website.
And while APT is continuing to optimise engagement on its owned channels, it is using Advertising Studio to maximise return on paid media. For example, APT has been able to focus its spend on customer acqusition by suppressing existing customers from Google paid search and discovery ad campaigns. In other instances, APT has opted to include existing customers in campaigns for key search terms to demonstrate brand authority.
APT has also leveraged Salesforce advertising audiences through Facebook, both to exclude existing customers from certain campaigns and to attract new customers by targeting lookalike audiences.
The combination of these activities has resulted in a remarkable 196% uplift in CTR. APT has also experienced a 66% reduction in cost-per-acqusition (CPA) from paid Facebook activity.
These results have contributed to a 25% year-on-year (YoY) increase in website visits across all APT’s brands and a 37% increase in website visits to the APT site specifically. Visitors were also more engaged with the sites, with APT showing a 52% increase in total page views and all brands combined showing a 39% increase in total page views.
APT has been thinking outside the box and innovating in other areas to bridge the gap between the online and offline customer experience. For example, it has refreshed its brochures to include fewer print pages along with QR codes with links to further information. The brochures are not only more environmentally friendly and less expensive to produce, but have been successful in driving more traffic to the website and generating more leads.
